Given recent data regarding fishing vessels switching off their Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) in the Western Indian Ocean, this article assesses the potential illegality of the practice by analysing national and international legislation. It shows that the enforcement of AIS laws is generally poor, and although these are becoming increasingly robust in some jurisdictions, the sanctions are not severe enough to act as deterrents. Furthermore, this article suggests that the insurance industry enables the practice of switching off AIS through weak due diligence practices. Insurers have a role to play in curbing such illegal behaviour, and it is not discretionary.

The field of human rights monitoring has become preoccupied with statistical methods for measuring performance, such as benchmarks and indicators. This is reflected within human rights scholarship, which has become increasingly ‘empirical’ in its approach. However, the relevant actors developing statistical approaches typically treat causality somewhat blithely, and this causes critical problems for such projects. This article suggests that resources—whether temporal or fiscal—may be better allocated towards improving methods for identifying violations rather than developing complicated, but ultimately ineffective, statistical methods for monitoring human rights performance.

This article explores the phenomenon of ‘disaggregation’ of disputes in international law, that is, the carving up of broader disputes into discrete legal claims based on different international legal rules and subject to the jurisdiction of different international tribunals. In particular, its focus is on certain under-explored consequences of this phenomenon for the jurisdiction of international tribunals, asking whether the relationship between the specific claims and the broader dispute might affect the jurisdiction of the tribunals. Employing the ongoing Ukraine/Russia dispute, which has yielded multiple claims before different international tribunals, the article offers an original analysis of these jurisdictional questions. It presents three approaches discernible from case law where tribunals face claims over which they appear to have jurisdiction that implicate a broader dispute over which they do not. The article ends with a consideration of possible explanations for why a tribunal might follow one approach over the others in any given case.

International human rights law advocates tolerance, inclusivity and the promotion of equality among peoples, nations and individuals across the world. It seems disappointing, therefore, that these standards do not always apply to the discipline of international human rights law itself. Instead there seems to be a hierarchy in the international human rights system. Others have written about such an approach in relation to different types of rights,1 reflecting political power struggles.2 This paper will consider whether African institutions are ‘third generation’ organs and perceived as of less value than others. It will argue that international human rights law has focused primarily on European and Western sources and neglected those from other jurisdictions. It has failed, therefore, to use African institutions, for instance, to provide examples of good practice, relying on them only as examples of what not to do. As Okafor and Agbakwa state, there is evidence of a one-way traffic, with Western scholars giving the impression that they feel they have little to learn from African institutions and their experiences: